


we were the boys from the beaches of brighton

by redskyatmorning



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, some weird kind of angsty fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-30
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-01-26 09:38:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1683680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redskyatmorning/pseuds/redskyatmorning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"So what'll it be tonight?" Steve says.  "Swapping war stories? Complaining about the younguns? Bingo, maybe."</p><p>He's rambling. He's nervous. It's Bucky, he tells himself firmly.<br/>~<br/>Steve and Bucky, both more lost than they realize, take the first step in mapping out the twenty-first century together, but, like an arrow, they have to take a step back before they can look forward again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we were the boys from the beaches of brighton

**Author's Note:**

> yeah, so the title is a bit of a play on a lyric from 'brooklyn's here' from the musical newsies. also, idk what this is, i just have a lot of feeling and no way to deal with them.

“Oh. Hi.”  
  
Bucky says it with an air of surprise, as though he weren’t expecting anyone to open the door, although he should know that Steve’s preference has always been to stay in on Friday nights. Well, he knew that at one point. The entire world has become fluid, unpredictable—even this one thing that was supposed to be set in stone, initials carved in the woodwork of a tiny Brooklyn apartment building that was torn down decades ago.  
  
“Hi,” Steve says, wrong-footed at his own uncertainty. “Come in?”  
  
He raises an eyebrow, smiling slightly. “Is that a question?”  
  
“No, I meant, come in, if you want. Do you want to come in? That was the question.”  
  
Bucky tilts his head to the side a moment in consideration, and then a moment more. It’s not a question worth that kind of contemplation, really, because no one knocks on someone’s door on a Friday night to chat on the threshold for a few minutes, especially not when it’s your once-best friend turned brainwashed assassin turned—well, this is a unique case, after all. Maybe the rulebook doesn’t apply. Maybe Bucky’s eyes will go blank again, his hands to Steve’s throat. Maybe, maybe.  
  
“Yeah, okay,” Bucky says finally, and Steve steps back to let him inside, his artist’s eye—enhanced by his soldier’s blood—drinking in the other man with a curious hesitancy, as if he were sipping at an oddly-coloured concoction given to him by Tony Stark. (That’s a rule he can confirm.) It's the damnedest thing, like getting used to his own face in the mirror after the serum, yet still somehow stranger. Bucky looks like memory, like hazy amalgamations of patchwork recollections and subconscious associations, and like 'I miss you,' all at once. He looks like memory, but his own is still more foreign to him than a cybernetic arm.  
  
"Is Natasha here?" Bucky peers uncertainly around Steve's tiny place as though she would jump out from behind the bookshelf and yell, 'Surprise!' Which, come to think of it, she just might. It doesn't escape Steve's notice the very Russian way he says her name, and the familiarity flitting around the edges of the accent.  
  
"No," Steve says, amused. "Well, not to my knowledge, which doesn't count for all that much, with her. Anyway, she's probably got better shit to do than hang around with us fossils. So what'll it be tonight? Swapping war stories? Complaining about the younguns? Bingo, maybe."  
  
He's rambling. He's nervous. It's Bucky, he tells himself firmly.  
  
Bucky, who'd been hanging about awkwardly, apparently for Natasha in some Christlike glory to deliver him from being one-on-one with Steve, now relaxes somewhat into Steve's worn brown leather sofa. "Very funny. Bridge is more my thing, actually."  
  
"Yeah?" Steve teases.  
  
"Oh, definitely. And knitting. As for war stories . . . you've kind of got me beat there, pal."  
  
Then, just like memory again, Bucky becomes exhausting to behold. He runs a hand distractedly through the hair that he now wears long, though not as wildly abandoned as a few months ago, but still scraggly, disheveled, not at all the flat broke Depression-era Brooklyn boy who made sure the scruff of his clothes never showed. Not just a hand--a metal one, flesh and bone circuitry reminding Steve of metamorphosis, of transformation, rebirth in a steel cage, empty. Empty, like what passed through his eyes moments ago when Steve said 'war' to an unwilling soldier. How much can a soul suffer before scrap metal spare parts won't repair it? For the first while, Bucky wouldn't let anyone see it, wearing layers of sweaters and full sleeves in mid-August, clutching at it in quiet terror whenever anyone drew enough, never using it in some gripping fear. Now he's clad in a dark T-shirt, the dim yellow light of Steve s apartment so casually glinting off the metal fingers now drumming absently a rhythm on the sofa. His eyes are ringed, and he is tired, it seems in them, of remembering, of forgetting. Exhausting.  
  
"Do you want a drink?" Steve says abruptly.  
  
Bucky shrugs, raising his eyebrows. "Can't get drunk. You know that. Captain."  
  
"Sucks, doesn't it? Learned it when you, well, died."  
  
"Well that didn't last. Here I am, in the flesh. Guess there are worse things than remembering, yeah?"  
  
"Like?"  
  
"Forgetting." He lifts his brow again, almost comically this time. "Why would you even have liquor, then? Stark make a lotta house calls?"  
  
"I like the taste?"  
  
It appears Bucky's eyebrows are poised to declare independence from his forehead.  
  
"Okay, I don't actually have any. I don't know why I offered."  
  
He chuckles. "Steve. I've missed you."  
  
Only when he utters Steve's name does Steve hear the serration around the normally smooth corners of his name, and he does not like to think what, in seven decades of no talking, it was that so roughened his voice.  
  
"No need for the melodrama, Buck, we saw each other last week."  
  
"Still. In general. Say that again."  
  
"What?"  
  
"My name."  
  
"Bucky?"  
  
"Sorry," Bucky says, rubbing his face and smoothing his hair back in a motion that makes him seem as though he's exasperated with himself. "Sorry I'm so weird."  
  
"No, come on," Steve says, attempting comfort, "I was the same when I woke up. It takes time."  
  
"Were you?"  
  
"Well, you know . . . ."  
  
"So, that's a no." Bucky smiles despite himself.  
  
"It's different. God, it's different. It could not be more different."  
  
"Couldn't it? Let's see," he begins to sarcastically tick off fingers on his cybernetic hand (Steve hates to keep noticing it, but it's like seeing someone play rock-paper-scissors with a Molotov cocktail), "Second world war army brats, scientifically enhanced into  human weapons, born in the early 20th century and still about thirty in 2014, achieved through the use of cryogenics . . . different, yeah, but it could be more different."  
  
"You're a little shit, aren't you?" Steve smiles, then sighs. "You're right, though. Remember when we were just a couple'a dumb kids trying to make it in the city? And now look at the both of us. What the hell happened?"  
  
Bucky could make a list again, matter-of-factly: a world plunged into war, two battling sides of the same coin, some Russians, some Americans, ice, genetic enhancement, science beyond either of their paygrades, a different sort of war, pain, cybernetics, bad luck, good soldiers. Two boys. Two not-quite-men, not-quite-corpses.  
  
"Fortune really fucked us good and hard, I guess," Bucky says finally, shrugging exaggeratedly, trying to make light of it.  
  
"I don't know, it could be worse."  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"We could have to go through it alone."  
  
"Yeah." Bucky closes his eyes for just a moment, a fraction of a second, really, but it's enough. He did, Steve realizes. For so long, in the cold, in the dark. All alone, not even there for himself. It punches him in the gut sometimes with the force of a tank; God knows what it does to him.  
  
"Hey," Steve says, after the silence stretches before them awkwardly. "Stay the night, why don't you? I've got room and a toothbrush. Like old times."  
  
"A room and a toothbrush. Yeah, okay," Bucky exhales, then grins at Steve. "So, how 'bout that magic picture box? Got any of them newfangled moving pictures on 'em?"  
  
Steve laughs. "You too?"  
  
"Jesus Christ, it's like they think it was still flint and stone and wooden clubs in '44. Yeah, okay, iPhones and whatever were kind of a punch in the gut, but, come on -- "  
  
" -- We're nothing if not adaptable. Like, my first month back -- alien invasion. And they think DVD players and, I don't know, Tassimos are going to freak me out."  
  
"Oh, yeah, New York, I heard about that. Good stuff. Wait, Tassimo? Is that the computer thing? Or phones, actually. Both?"  
  
"No, neither. It's like an oversimplified coffeemaker, except needlessly complex."  
  
"You just accurately summarized this whole damn century."  
  
"Look at us crotchety old nonagenarians."  
  
Bucky is now smiling broadly, and they talk some more, careful not to reminisce at all, remaining by some strict unspoken rule within the confines of the 21st century, lest they get lost again in the past.  
  
"How come we never talk anymore, Buck?" Steve says presently, wistful for something he doesn't have a name for, for an older, more broken city whose narrow streets and peeling paint could still fit in the palm of the hand of a boy who's smile was still whole.  
  
"Takes two," is all he says, smile faltering nearly imperceptibly.  
  
"You're right."  
  
Decisive, Steve purposefully starts up a movie, something called _Harry Potter_ that Sam said was to die for but Natasha relegated to children, and stupid ones at that, and he settles back into the sofa next to Bucky, not bothering to dim the lights, knowing that they probably won't pay much attention to it (sacrilege, he can hear Sam's exasperated cry in his mind's ear).   As he does so, Steve's shoulder brush with the metal arm. He winces slightly at its chill -- although not unexceptionally cold, it's not the warmth he was expecting, the reliable human-ness that they can no longer take for granted.  
  
"Oh, sorry," Bucky says, moving it away part-sheepishly, part-shamefully, again so strange, but lions purr too.  
  
"What? No, it's just . . . cold . . . that's all. You know what?"  
  
Before Bucky can assert as to whether or not he knows what, Steve resolutely moves over to Bucky's other side,  the one with blood and veins and thirty-seven familiar degrees of warmth. He doesn't comment. There's a certain separation in this age that seems to be required of all but the most intimate of relations, a coolness, a distance to which he hasn't yet prescribed and he hopes Bucky is the same. In any case, this never was the most conventional of friendships. Closeness is all that got them through sometimes, all those years ago, and it's only a hundred miles uphill from here on out. Though in this moment it seems to be levelling off nicely as Bucky fondly puts his arm around him, ruffling his hair in a momentary fit of great affection.  
  
The winter night is cold around them, outside the confines of Steve's apartment, but they've both seen colder. Nevertheless, they somehow manage to eventually get tangled up in a blanket despite the central heating and their mutual general superhumanness. Bucky insisted the lights be off, so the high, accented voices of the young leads curve softly around the darkness outside the round TV screen. By today's standards, the curved screen is obsolete and about twelve inches too small, but it suits his needs just fine. Everything is just fine as long as he doesn't think about it too hard, and they won't get much further than that, and that's just fine.  
  
Eventually, somewhere in the middle of the movie when Steve is suitably impressed by the digital creation of a three-headed dog, Bucky makes a noise and shifts, and only then does he realize that his head is resting somewhere on Bucky's chest (despite his newly acquired height, the fit is as perfect as it was in the last century).  
  
He, too, shifts away questioningly.  
  
"Steve," he says, and despite his face deepened by the shadows of the late night and highlighted by the bluish TV-screen glow, Steve can see it troubled, as though he'd spent the last hour in some confounding contemplation; but he says nothing further.  
  
"Bucky?"  
  
"I'm -- God, this is so stupid, I'm scared."  
  
"It's just a movie."  
  
"No, no, no. I'm scared of -- of I don't even know what, I'm just scared, all the time, and I'm sick of it. Me, I guess. This -- the past. I miss it so much, you know? The past before, well, the past."  
  
"I do too, believe me."  
  
"Really? Do you? You got a pretty sweet deal with the super soldier stuff -- no, you deserved it, you did, no one knows that more than me -- and everyone loves you, and you're fine, but I -- I'm -- I'm a killer, Steve, I . . . "  
  
"Bucky, come on, it wasn't you."  
  
"You couldn't even look me in the eyes for the longest time and say that."  
  
There is a pause.  
  
"Steve," Bucky says, fracturing the silence with a short, sharp laugh. "We should be dead. We should be fuckin' six feet under by now. We would be the lucky ones."  
  
"No."  
  
"No?"  
  
"No. Just . . . no. It's never like that."  
  
"You are _such_ a bastion of goodly light and moral uprighteousness, it's . . ."  
  
"Tiresome?" Steve smiles.  
  
"The goddamn best thing about you."  
  
This short exchange, the most meaningful they've had in all the months Bucky's been back, has opened some sort of floodgate, unwriting the unwritten rule of not speaking about the most important things, the only things that ever mattered.    
  
"God I missed you -- "  
  
"I _missed_ you, so many years -- "  
  
"So many years I didn't even know who I was and I missed you through all of them, Jesus, Steve -- "  
  
" _Bucky_ . . ."  
  
And all they do is talk for the rest of the night; the movie plays out its course and the TV goes blank and they talk about every single memory that they want to relive, every touch and and every forbidden taste back when there was still a point to it outside of desperation, all the trapping of this little corner of the city now curtained in a layer of bland modernity turning it into the worst kind of stranger, unrecognizable after deep intimacy --     
  
"I missed you," Steve says again, voice muffled against the warmth of Bucky's chest.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"We gotta keep looking forward, though."  
  
"Aye, aye, captain. Doesn't it seem impossible, though? The past ain't just black-and-white pictures, it's so goddamn heavy you can't take a goddamn step forward sometimes."  
  
"Yeah, isn't it like that?"  
  
"I just wanna burn this fucking glass-and-steel city down until we find the old places again in the ashes and then maybe things can be like they were."  
  
"Keep lookin' forward, Sergeant Barnes."  
  
"Ha."  
  
For the first time on this side of the Berlin wall coming down, they let themselves bask in these small constellations of one another, and it's nothing like it was before, but that, that's just fine.  
  



End file.
